Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Scorn over claim of teleported DNA: Faced with widespread scepticism over the paper, including from the chemist Felix Franks who had advised against publication, Nature recruited magician James Randi and chemist and "fraudbuster" Walter Stewart of the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, to investigate Benveniste's methods. They found his result to be "a delusion", based on a flawed design. In 1991, Benveniste repeated his experiment under double-blind conditions, but not to the satisfaction of referees at Nature and Science. Two years later came the final indignity when he was suspended for damaging the image of his institute.